Our state representative, Jason Overstreet reports from Olympia about the right to protect ourselves, our family and our property: House Bill 1371 -- Washington State Firearms Freedom Act. 

The rights Jason describes are protected by (not granted by) The Second Amendment in The Bill of Rights of The United States Constitution, and by Section 24 of The Washington State Constitution.

The gun-grabbers will have to trample through a lot of binding contractual protections between the Government and We the People, in order to infringe on this and all of our other natural rights. 

In the end, we'd still have those rights, though to exercise them would merely put us at odds with a tyrannical regime, as another local blogger succinctly put it. Sadly, we'd have lots of company down through history. 

That number again is 1-800-562-6000.  Dial it, and let Olympia lawmakers know where you stand on House Bill 1371 which protects existing laws and rights.  Here's something to add if you'd like:   Many thousands of responsibly owned firearms sit legally and silently at the ready in city and rural homes and places of business lawfully, to deter untold numbers of crimes, without ever being wielded, or a shot being fired.   The misguided criminalization of responsible and law-abiding behavior will never "solve" anything.

WE would like to thank Sheriff Bill Elfo and other officials who worked quickly to prevent the release of a dangerous sex offender in Whatcom County.

Because of this timely intervention, the Washington State Intermediate Sentencing Review Board is revisiting their decision regarding Donald Randolph Hooper. WE urge readers to contact Governor Inslee's office immediately to voice your objection to paroling this violent criminal.  Melt the phone lines! According to the board’s staff, the decision to grant parole to Hooper was discretionary and not mandatory. The Governor may reverse the ruling. Please insist they honor their duty to uphold public safety.

In a story on the Whatcom Sheriff's Support Foundation Blog, WE learned that in December, 1982, Donald Hooper raped and attempted to murder a 14-year-old girl. He abducted his victim at gunpoint from a Seattle bus stop, bound and gagged her, molested her, and forced her into the trunk of his car. Hooper, a State Ferry system worker, then boarded a ferry for Kitsap County. He drove to a remote area, and raped the child. Afterward, he tightened the tie wraps he used to bind her, then threw her in the Hood Canal, leaving her for dead.

Hooper received a life sentence for this crime, which was described as "a calculated, callous and cold-blooded offense that reflects a total disregard for human life.” In 1986, he was convicted of an additional, prior kidnapping and rape, involving a hitchhiker. In that instance, the victim was also a stranger whom he kidnapped at gunpoint and bound with tie wraps. The conviction was later overturned on procedural grounds. But Hooper also confessed to other sex offences which were not prosecuted.

The Department of Corrections has rated Donald R. Hooper a Level III sex offender, indicating a high risk to re offend. According to Sheriff Elfo: “Hooper should not be turned lose to re-offend in Whatcom County or for that matter, any other community. He is physically capable of victimizing more women and children. The State even admits that he is likely to re-offend. We do not want to raise the possibility that we will have to inform a parent that Hooper has harmed their child without first doing all we can to reverse a decision that we feel is contrary to the safety of our citizens.”

Update: The latest word is that as a result of Sheriff Elfo's action, this board may simply opt to release Hooper somewhere else instead. That is not acceptable, and WE're sure it isn't what Sheriff Elfo had in mind either. 

In your wildest dreams, can you imagine that government planners, highly paid to work on your behalf, would put place to live, human safety, and independent rural life in the bottom tier of “community attributes/values and relative priority”?  Watch your ass, Jack.  That’s exactly what they’re doing. Check out these priorities:

That's a mighty 'progressive' agenda to impose on all plans and the water users of Whatcom County! WE wonder how many people agree with it. It sure doesn't sound like a cross section of interests from across the county to us. So, who might come up with a list like that?  WE can tell you:

• Henry Bierlink, Farm Friends
  
• Clare Fogelsong, City of Bellingham
  
• Sue Blake, WSU Extension Whatcom County
  
• Peter Gill, Whatcom County Planning Dept.
  
• George Boggs, Whatcom Conservation District
  
• Oliver Grah, Nooksack Tribe Natural Resources Dept.
  
• Eric Carabba, Whatcom Land Trust
  
• Kasey Ignac, Washington Dept. of Ecology
  
• Alan Chapman, Lummi Nation Natural Resources Dept.
  
• Bert Rubash, Marine Resources Committee
  
• Treva Coe, Nooksack Tribe Natural Resources Dept.
  
• Rebecca Schlotterback, Public Utility District No. 1
  
• Erika Douglas, Whatcom County Public Works
  
• Marcus Schumacher, CCA North Sound
  
• Barbara Fisher, Lummi Nation Natural Resources Dept.
  
• Wendy Steffensen, Re Sources
  
• Bill Verwolf, City of Lynden/Small Cities Partnership
  

Who would coordinate such a meeting, working up lists like that?  Becky Peterson, an independent contractor working under the business name “Geneva Consulting.”   There's a lot of special interest on the list, innit?

Who would mastermind and pay for this?  The Puget Sound Partnership.  Whatcom County joined up as a "local integrating organization" a while ago.

With our money?  Yes!   They use federal and state tax money, quite a lot of it.

Why are they doing this?  To “restore the watershed.”

Huh?  Restore to what level? What’s going on?  There's all this talk about the Growth Management Act having to protect "rural character" to conserve farms and agriculture. Independent rural living is a zero? Can this be true? Yes!  Government, supposed to protect human rights and safety, prioritizes everything but!

At a meeting held January 31 in Bellingham, these seventeen people met for two and a half hours in their third meeting of the “Whatcom Integration Team” (WIT for short). 

But a handful of citizens heard about this and showed up uninvited, sitting on the sidelines stunned. They could hardly contain shock and awe at what was described as a “technical” planning exercise, and all kinds of other local plans were discussed.  It seems that everything that happens in the watershed falls within their reach, they say - to protect water and fish.   To do that, they'll have to involve themselves in land use, forestry, farming - everything.  Where we live, what we do.

How could “community attributes/values” like cultural be considered technical?  Water rights, baby.  And planning control. To put a finer point on it, to determine which “watershed services” are most important in the big ecological scheme of things - at least according to these government bureaucrats, tribal staffers, and a very short list of preferred special interest groups who live on grants, rent-seeking.

You see, use of water is managed by the state (the Department of Ecology), and that use has to be “beneficial.”  Very few people have documented water rights on paper, stapled to the deeds of their property (property: that thing you used to have free use of).  While the state Supreme Court made it clear that people have a right to use water without permits (many if not most are legally "exempt"), the use has to be beneficial.  Without documents and permits, and even with them, water use has limits.  But the limits are pretty generous.  That may change drastically here in one of the most water-soaked places in the state, if the planners have free rein.

Is your use of water less beneficial than somebody else’s?  That’s the gazillion dollar question.  If you live independently in a rural area,  you're definitely at the bottom of this list, value/attribute =  zero.  How did this water planning business get so far out of whack?

Whatcom County falls inside a big watershed that was categorized years ago by the state as Water Resource Inventory Area #1 (WRIA for short, sounds like “why-rah”).  Back in 1998, the legislature in Olympia came up with a way for folks who don’t have formal water rights, plus the few who do, to work out watershed planning together.  Whether people drew water from the ground (like, from a well) or from the surface (from a river or stream), they’d all work as something called a Planning Unit.  What’s the bill that set up this process?  It's the Watershed Planning Act, RCW 90.82. Take a look at it.

So, that sounds pretty good.  What’s going on?  Are these people who are coming up with lists like this supposed to be setting goals and  for our watershed?  Big NO. 

Whatcom County Charter says that only council, our legislature, can adopt plans.  In Charter 2.20(d) it says council’s job is “To adopt by ordinance comprehensive plans, including improvement plans for the present and future development of the county.”

When that planning act was passed, each inventory area (each WRIA) was legally obliged to develop its own local plan.  The law said an area’s county government (or governments, if a watershed crossed county lines), plus its biggest city, local tribes if there were any, and the biggest “utility” had a duty to  make sure the work got done.  So City of Bellingham, the Lummi Tribe, PUD #1 and Whatcom County signed a contract to work together, and Whatcom County took the official “lead agency” role.  Then the Nooksack Tribe joined-up.  As a group, these five were called the IG - or “initiating governments.”  And the state paid money for them to get something started called a Planning Unit.  The law said,

The purpose of this chapter is to develop a more thorough and cooperative method of determining what the current water resource situation is in each water resource inventory area of the state and to provide local citizens with the maximum possible input concerning their goals and objectives for water resource management and development.

It is necessary for the legislature to establish processes and policies that will result in providing state agencies with more specific guidance to manage the water resources of the state consistent with current law and direction provided by local entities and citizens through the process established in accordance with this chapter.

So, the local process was supposed to provide the local citizens a real role in planning, not pass it off.  This was supposed to give state agencies guidance, "direction provided by local entities and citizens" not the reverse. Sounds very reasonable.

And a bottom up Planning Unit was formed just as the law required, and County Council approved that in 2005.  This local group (actually, a group of groups called Planning Unit “caucuses” for water associations, cities, the PUD and so on) worked together for four years. The county’s departments would attend, and contractors were hired who were supposed to help determine the water situation. The Planning Unit would review and vote on the acceptability of technical work as studies were done.  Some very extremely expensive work was done by USGS and a university that didn’t go well.  The "current situation" wasn't well understood.  And as time went by, questions were asked that were unwelcome.  By August 2009, the bureaucrats decided to simply “stop convening” the Planning Unit; even though there were protests about it.  But the initiating governments - the big five -  decided to hand over the work to their own staff, called the Management Team.

In short, that’s how so many bureaucrats ended up doing what they’re doing.  After the Planning Unit was out of the picture, they adopted and they're "implementing" a new set of plans on their own.  And at this point does this look anything like what the Planning Act called for?  And the Puget Sound Partnership is directing how other local plans should fit into its own regional "Action Plan."

WE did some poking around, and discovered the “WIT” meetings have been happening way outside the Council's knowledge and view. We can thank the Puget Sound Partnership and the WRIA 1 initiating governments (IG's) for WIT.   They abandoned the council approved process, and departments and agencies have run everything internally. The WRIA initiating governments joined up with the  regional group of governor appointees, the Puget Sound Partnership which brought them lots of grant money.  PSP is an unelected quasi-agency, a bureaucracy with zero accountability to citizens. Geneva Consulting works directly for the PSP as well as to WRIA; very convenient.

With work like this going on, WE think it's good that citizens have gone into "WRIA Watch" mode.  People are meeting at the Rome Grange at 7 pm Friday Feb 8, and there may be another meeting Monday Feb 11, too! 

Write to council right away and call too if you can, if you think this is mixed-up and backwards.  Better speak loudly and soon.   

WRIA 1 desperately wants to hand even more of this over to the PUD next Tuesday February 12 on a one-way trip that will take this totally beyond the Watershed Planning Act.  The PUD only serves water directly to Cherry Point, but they want to take over planning, to develop a "Water Supply Plan" for the whole county.  Sound anything like what the WRIA law requires?  "The powers' are furious that everyday people, particularly farmers and rural people, should try to stop this.  When you explain your concerns, you might want to remind them that...

Some citizens attended the Whatcom Integration Team meeting held December 11. This is the report submitted by one ~ Editors

Have you ever wondered where all of the money goes that you and the rest of the nation freely provide to our government?  You hear all kinds of stories of the bridges to nowhere, extravagant agency parties, and overpriced muffins.  Well, the following is an example of that very same type of spending going on in Whatcom County.

Have you ever heard of the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP)?  Well, PSP is a Non-Government Organization that was charged “by Governor Gregoire and the Legislature… to create a real Action Agenda that turns things around and leads to a healthy Puget Sound”.  The PSP states that it “is a community effort of citizens, governments, tribes, scientists and businesses working together to restore and protect Puget Sound”.

Here in Whatcom County the PSP and our county government are financing a special group of people called the Whatcom Integration Team (WIT) with our money to “clean up and protect Puget Sound”.  Having attended the second in a series of up to eight  monthly meetings between November of 2012 and June of 2013, the pointless spending and the planned continuum of spending was obvious.  There were 17 individuals siting at the table and an additional 3 sitting away from the table for a total of 20.  When you assume an hour travel time to and from the two hour meeting it adds up to 60 man-hours of work.  If you also assume a very conservative average wage $50.00 per hour, that is about $3,000.00 per meeting and a total of $24,000 for all of the planned meetings.  Add into this the cost of the contracted meeting facilitator.  The County Executive just recently increased the contract value for this person an addition $90,000 for a total of approximately ???.

A second and somewhat unexpected sign of the wanton spending was the open comments by participants that they needed to make sure that they structured the meetings results to identify the best outcomes to assure their ability to obtain additional grant moneys from the government.  It is also noted that the meeting schedule (interestingly called a “roadmap”) shows that for Meeting #5 (in March) the “members consider options for criteria for grant funding purposes”.  One can draw their own conclusions from this type of thinking, but to us it is wasteful thinking and not necessarily keeping with any concept of reduced government and reduced spending.

The third indication of this fanciful and unnecessary over-spending only proposition was the makeup of the meeting members.  The members are from our county and city planning staff, from Ecology, from the tribes, from the Whatcom Land Trust, from Farm Friends and from various other resource groups and non-profit organizations.  Where are the citizens and business representation that were identified in the PSP community effort?  Where are the local experts from the water, farming and timber industries?  Where are the other private business interests? Where are the property owners whose fates are being determined by this unofficial and non-binding non-government organizational “Team”?

Finally, the meeting provided the cover for an outcome that could surely have been determined by even the very minimally informed progressive thinker. The first meeting  identified the ecosystem the members wanted to include, the services or things that the ecosystem may provide for, the pressures or threats that society places on these ecosystem services, and the community values and attributes that are part of the ecosystems.  Wow, is that a mouthful!  As an example, forests are an ecosystem.  Biodiversity is a service for this ecosystem.  One of the pressures or threats to this service is recreational activities while recreation is also an example of a community value or attribute.  The meeting facilitator had organized all of this information into 10 separate ecosystems, 12 services, 16 pressures and 20 values.   These items were divided into two separate tables that each shared the ecosystems on the horizontal axis and the ecosystem services on the vertical axis.  One table identifies the community attributes for each ecosystem or ecosystem service and the second table identifies the pressures on each of the ecosystem or ecosystem service (refer to the WIT Tables) (pdf).   After the first hour of the meeting the members had pretty much agreed on the tables with a few additions to both the community values and to the pressures.  The facilitator pointed out that the local community “visioning” results were reviewed to assure that nothing had been overlooked. (Let’s make sure we cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.)

During the second hour of the meeting, the members were given two sets of four each individual sticky notes.  The members were instructed to use these pads to help determine the priorities of the community attributes listed on one whiteboard, and the separate attributes for the pressures as listed on a second whiteboard.   Those values and pressures that received the most sticky notes would have the highest priorities.  Well, who could have guessed the outcome from such a Delphi experience?  Lo and behold, the top three community values were sustainability, green infrastructure, and quality of life respectively.  The top three pressures were climate change, residential and commercial development; and, agriculture and livestock grazing respectively.  These are personal impressions, not science. Are these not the primary focus of the all too familiar effort for the increasing pressure that seems to grow in leaps and bounds on the ecosystem called property rights?   All too many meetings just like this one are just a small part of the increasing threat to our rights as citizens in the name of the environment and the collective.

This is just one example of these non-binding non-government organizations that seem to inundate our culture and government activity.  Does it seem ironic that these non-binding findings are generated by professional, full time paid employees who are doing their “day” jobs?  Where is the community effort?  Where are  the citizens and business members?  Unsurprisingly, they are working at their day jobs to pay the individuals sitting at these tables scheming to usurp our constitutionally protected natural rights, under the cover of environmentalism.

One of the scariest things is that this example is also going on without the full knowledge and approval of our own County Council.  Funding for many of these groups does not pass through the council agenda, as they can be approved by County Department Heads or the County Executive. We all need to pay more attention to where the money is coming from and what it is being spent on. 

The County Council should put the Whatcom Integration Team out of business by taking away their funding.  This should be the WIT’s end.